


lux

by Batman



Series: tonight, this war is easily lost [2]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-06 20:43:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6769204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Batman/pseuds/Batman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <span class="small">His hands leave apologies like stars in their wake. Antares, 1.09. <i>I’m sorry for my hands around your neck</i>. Aldebaran, 0.75. <i>I’m sorry that those were my hands around your neck</i>. He’s sorry for his hands around Ronan’s neck; words are not obvious enough for the horror that his fingers remember. Ronan’s racing pulse under them for all the wrong reasons, that brief, split-second where Ronan must have thought it was <i>him</i>.</span>
</p><p>Over the course of a handful of fortnights, Adam comes back to himself, and Ronan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lux

**Author's Note:**

> I HAVE A PROBLEM AND IT'S CALLED ADAM AND RONAN'S EARTHSHAKING LOVE.
> 
> (As tagged, there are spoilers for TRK ahead!)

When you take the hands of someone you love,  
what happens to those hands?  
— Rumi

 

He’s started to want (if not ask for) more and more, and sometimes it takes even him by surprise. He’d always walked through the air thinking it’s borrowed or hard-earned depending on which side of the bed he’d woken up that morning, thinking that everything comes with a price (which it does; everything comes with a price and what a price, sometimes) and that if he is alive and breathing, then he has to give back by filling those hours with everything in the world that he is capable of. Work and studying and work again.

Maybe he hasn’t really started to want more things. Maybe it’s more that he’s started to tell himself that he’s allowed to want what he was always allowed to want. He’s allowed to want a magnificent college, he’s allowed to want a bigger car (someday) even if he already has one (he’s allowed to stop marvelling over the fact that he has a car). He’s allowed to want to buy apple juice even if there is already orange juice in the fridge— there is more than one flavour of juice and he isn’t on a military regime, he doesn’t have to be on a military regime. He’s allowed to not want to be on a military regime.

He’s allowed to want to keep things. Gansey’s favour, Blue’s touches, the little memories he lived with Noah when it was sometimes just the two of them. He’s allowed to want Henry to look at him too, allowed to want a share in the grief over Persephone, allowed to want to see how different people can love differently. How he can love different people differently.

He’s allowed to want to keep things. He’s allowed to want to keep this, whatever this is— not that he isn’t willing to give it a name, but because _relationship_ is the most ridiculously inadequate word for it— that Ronan shares with him. That he and Ronan share.

He thinks, though, that if he ever put it that way to Ronan, the boy would glare at him seven ways to Sunday and storm off. He would take it as lack of confidence, lack of trust, when all Adam wants to say is _my love is so large it turns into fear_.

 

Ω

 

Night is one of Adam’s favourite things. Even though he’s worked shifts, and very often, where he only actually gets to fall into his bed when the sun is starting to come up, with the knowledge that he’ll have to be up in a timed hour and half to get to school, there is still a part of him that associates the moonrise with rest.

At the Barns, the apparent magnitude of the stars diminishes so unnaturally that Adam sometimes thinks that Ronan might as well have dreamt up the sky that comes with the fields. They shine so brightly that he cannot take his eyes off them, especially whenever he’s on the rooftop. And when he’s on the rooftop, he’s only there to stare at the stars. Ronan is beside him more often than not, but Ronan is a thing so solid and steady that Adam doesn’t feel that desperate need to look at him and confirm his presence, the way he does with everything else he has in life.

No, just Ronan’s shoulder, touching his own, is enough. Just Ronan is enough. Just Ronan is more than everything else put together, more strong, more beautiful, more permanent.

Night is one of Adam’s favourite things, because after he’s had his fill of the stars (not completely, he doesn’t think he’ll ever have it completely) Ronan sometimes carries him downstairs and throws him onto the bed without ceremony, and when he says _time to sleep_ he means it.

 

Ω

 

On the first night of the first week (he counts it as the first instead of the previous night, because it was hardly a night— dragging themselves to Fox Way, falling in a mess of limbs and tears and sighs of not-relief, gulping down Blue’s tea no matter how terrible) he feels like he’s coming back to sleep at the Barns after an infinity. Everything that passed between the last time he was here and this _first night_ makes him feel more potently older than all of (what he refuses to call) overworking ever did.

The bed is the softest he’s ever lain in. He doesn’t think he’s ever _lain_ in a bed before in his life, but that’s the only way to describe how Ronan puts him down against the pillows and looks at him, one knee on the edge of the bed, arms on either side of him, face inches from his own.

It’s hard to understand how he could deserve this after his hands doing what they did to Ronan.

‘I don’t know if you got the memo,’ he says, ‘but I am no longer a magic princess.’

‘I don’t know if you got the memo,’ Ronan replies, ‘but I don’t really care.’

On the first night of the first week, Adam puts Ronan to sleep with tired, honest laughter and the most mundane of murmurs: _tomorrow I have to see what kind of crap you keep in your fridge, the kid needs to eat multigrain bread, you know; that kid will eat a goddamn sock if you give her one, you just want to play house, Parrish_.

He _does_ just want to play house. He can’t remember the last time he wanted something so whole and wholesome. Not a compromise, not a _can I pass one night without aspirin_ but something that is more of a concept than a plea. And Ronan is not a plea. Ronan was never a plea.

 

Ω

 

When you touch someone and it’s the first time that you are touching, who does the teaching and who does the learning? He wants to say, do his hands cause the shift of Ronan’s shoulders, or is the shift of Ronan’s shoulders what guides them to new places?

His hands leave apologies like stars in their wake. Antares, 1.09. _I’m sorry for my hands around your neck_. Aldebaran, 0.75. _I’m sorry that those were_ my _hands around your neck_. He’s sorry for his hands around Ronan’s neck; words are not obvious enough for the horror that his fingers remember. Ronan’s racing pulse under them for all the wrong reasons, that brief, split-second where Ronan must have thought it was _him_.

Ronan takes them again and again, stops them in their nervous paths and brings them to his lips. He fits his hot lips around Adam’s bruised knuckles like he means to own them. And Adam, Adam has never given himself up like this before.

 

Ω

 

On the first night of the fourteenth week, Adam gets a letter from his first choice reminding him that it’s a binding decision, and that the binding decision should be fine since they’re his first choice.

Henry throws a most hideously extravagant dinner party, one that Adam would’ve complained about if he wasn’t over the fucking moon. He allows himself the night to rejoice, doesn’t have to promise to think about the money in the morning because he knows he’ll do it anyway. Those calculations run quicker in his thoughts than his thoughts probably do, numbers before smiles. He doesn’t know how long it will take to unlearn that, but one day he will. One day he will.

For the night, there is good food and better alcohol, and if there’s a time to get drunk, it’s this one. Adam always wants to look ahead, always wants to make something of his life and future that stays rock-solid and noticeable, but he wants all those first times to play out in the safety of this circle— in Gansey recording all those shots on his camera, in Blue outright refusing to consume anything “with that smell”, in Henry spilling more than pouring from bottles, in every single smile and laugh that reminds him that he is allowed this because it is not how his father drank.

When everything is much brighter, like the stars at the Barns, he allows himself to laugh too. Loud and crooked and the most carefree he’s been in a while— the worst has already happened. The worst was his hands tied behind him, a blindfold on his eyes, the sound of Ronan dying.

‘It only gets better from here,’ he says, and it’s so disgustingly optimistic that he laughs again.

‘I’ll drive up every weekend,’ Ronan says lowly, fiercely.

‘The scary thing is that I know he actually will,’ Gansey says, and Adam laughs one more time. It only gets better from here.

On the first night of the fourteenth week, he falls against their pillows with a dramatic swoon, and only vaguely registers Ronan pulling his boots off for him. Reaches out in the darkness, fumbling, until he finds hands in his own.

‘Drive up every weekend,’ he says. ‘You’d better drive up every weekend.’

 

Ω

 

When you touch someone and it’s the first time that you are touching, who does the telling and who does the knowing?

His hands leave apologies like stars in their wake. Draco, 2.4. _I’m sorry for my hands around your neck_.

‘They weren’t _yours_ ,’ Ronan growls, and that’s when he knows he’s spoken aloud— although it’s Ronan, so he might have heard anyway. ‘It wasn’t _you_ , damn it, Parrish. _It wasn’t you_.’

 

Ω

 

Ronan makes him a little blue flower one day, that eventually earns a place in the kitchen. He doesn’t put it on a toothpick because that’s the most uncouth thing he’s heard of— and he grew up in _Henrietta_ — but instead manages to fix it in position on the fridge. Henry immediately makes some kind of Henry-ish comparison to putting up your kid’s drawings on the fridge, but Adam can’t even counter him because he’s absolutely correct.

The flower is _ridiculously_ small and is simultaneously the most naïve and most obnoxious thing that Ronan has ever made (which is saying something since Ronan’s very basis of living is being as naïve and obnoxious in the same breath as possible) and is the best reminder of his existence that Adam could ever want apart from those occasional love bites on his shoulder blades. He’ll ask for a vase to put it in, eventually. He doesn’t like to ask for things, especially ones that he knows are coming anyway.

 

Ω

 

On the first night of the twenty eighth week, they fall asleep on the rooftop. Adam, who used to feel like he could fall asleep on his feet if he allowed himself to, thinks that the stars are almost too bright to let him sleep in peace. He can almost see them when he closes his eyes, where the memory of their sight pulses and glows into phosphenes.

When his conscious is making its last efforts to remain that way, he feels Ronan leave his side. Cranes his neck to see where he’s going, then laughs just because the sight of him against that bright night sky is so profound that it renders his mind silent.

‘Go to sleep,’ Ronan says, without turning around.

 

Ω

 

 _It wasn’t you, it wasn’t you, it wasn’t you_. Stop crying stars onto skin, Adam, those hands belonged to something else. These hands belong to Ronan.

‘It wasn’t you,’ Ronan says. ‘I’ll say it as many times as you want me to.’ Want. ‘It wasn’t you.’

 

Ω

 

When spring arrives and they graduate from Aglionby, they invite the world and its cousins over to the Barns. Necessity made a smart cook out of Adam, but with a full fridge and a dignified share of his own in the expenses (he wins a lot more arguments against Ronan than others might think) he allows himself to experiment once a week. _Try this, Opal, I promise it’s better than last time. You eat socks anyway_.

He cooks up a feast that Helen is unabashedly stunned by, and trades recipes with her while Ronan delivers a series of proud noogies to Blue for making a comment about some article of Gansey’s attire. Adam wishes that none of them were victim to Ronan’s noogies enough to understand the nuances of each one in the first place.

At the end of dinnertime, Ronan corners him in the kitchen. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

‘Channeling the Giving Tree today?’ Adam says, raising an eyebrow. He already knows what present Ronan’s got waiting for Blue, for the next morning, and the simple idea of Ronan’s hand still being in his is so overwhelming that he hadn’t expected something else for himself on top of that.

‘Haha, smartass,’ Ronan snaps. ‘Just shut it and follow me.’

It’s when he leads Adam into the woods that used to be Cabeswater that Adam allows his heartbeat to pick up pace, to start racing, pounding, stuttering a little. It’s dark but for the stars, like always, so he’s surprised when Ronan asks him to close his eyes.

He lets Ronan pull him through the shrubbery and the occasional rock that his foot slips on, and takes a deep breath when they come to a stop and Ronan whispers _okay_.

When he opens his eyes, he only dimly sees that they’re in a clearing of sorts before his attention is siphoned into so many directions where—

On all the young trees around him, there are small glass jars, so small. An inch tall at the biggest, and half an inch across, and— something glowing in the heart of each one. Adam steps forward in a gold-lit daze, and carefully unhooks one jar from a stem. There is a wreath of those small, obnoxiously naïve blue flowers around the rim, and in the heart of the jar—

‘I see you looking up all the time,’ Ronan says. ‘Made you some to carry around on earth.’

Adam looks up from the little firefly he holds in his palm to all the rest suspended in the dark clouds of the trees. Above, the stars look whiter than ever, studded against the golden glow of the fireflies. He imagines Ronan sleeping and waking in these very woods, chasing the little creatures, coaxing them into the jars or willing the jars around them, and his throat catches on something he doesn’t know how not to want.

On the first night of the forty second week, Adam makes love to Ronan. Adam makes light to Ronan.

 

Ω

 

When you touch someone and it’s the first time you’re touching, what do you do with all the scattered starlight?

His hands pull stars out of Ronan’s veins the way Ronan pulls flowers out of his dreams. Sirius, Vega, Altair. And here is Orion’s belt at the base of his spine, such a delicious shudder working its way up Ronan’s torso with the touch of Adam’s fingers there, an earthquake to inaugurate the constellation. _That wasn’t me, but this is. This is me. This is me._

 _This is you. This is real. Only this is real_.

 

Ω

 

On the first morning of the fifty sixth week, Adam wakes with the rising sun. Ronan’s arms around him are tight, so very tight. He wants the sun, and the stars, and he wants Ronan, which is the same thing. He lies on their bed with his eyes half-closed, and he wants as much as he wants.

‘Parrish,’ Ronan says after a while, and his voice is full of tears. ‘Wake up, God.’

‘I’ve been awake for hours,’ Adam says.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/soldierpoetking) and [Tumblr](http://sturlsons.tumblr.com). 
> 
> Let us collectively hope that I will shut up about these two now. 
> 
> Also, tomorrow I'm buying a pair of Kavinsky shades. I need them in my life.


End file.
